


After Serenity

by websandwhiskers



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Coping, F/F, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 09:32:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/websandwhiskers/pseuds/websandwhiskers





	After Serenity

The first knife she buys, after, is ornate, beautiful, adorn with jewels. The blade is steel and kept sharp, and it feels balanced in her hand, but Inara feels it is a compromise. It could easily be an accessory of the darker, more specialized aspects of her trade.  
  
She never felt called in that direction, at least not before. That was before, though, and now she skims requests for companionship of a very specific nature, as she ignores the increasingly pointed demands that she present herself forthwith to the headmistress on Sinon and explain her whereabouts. Explain her involvement in unseemly political affairs. Explain herself.  
  
She fingers her pretty knife and rejects suitor after suitor, and never replies.  
  
Eventually the messages change tone; they are at first actually more polite. She is no longer addressed as a daughter, subject to the scathing tones of the Guild’s indignation. There will be a hearing. She’s offered council; she’s also offered counseling.  
  
Inara accepts neither, does not attend, and when she receives the communication telling her she is no longer a Companion, she is sitting in her shuttle clutching a very utilitarian pistol. She’s owned a pistol for years, something functional but elegant, skating the outer edges of the Guild’s approval, but this is different.  
  
She asked Jayne’s incredulous advice on this one; it’s black and heavy, a projectile weapon that could take down a horse at two hundred paces. Mal approves, possibly because he’s never seen the first, squeamish, bejeweled knife; he doesn’t understand. He never has, and likely never will.  
  
A few of her old clients send messages, distressed in varying degrees by her excommunication. One or two – the Senator, of course – say it doesn’t matter. To hell with social convention, it’s her they want.  
  
She tries to reply to that one message, to a fellow woman. The letter grows too large to be sent in one piece, too much data for a single transfer on Serenity’s decrepit systems, but she keeps writing anyway, because she’s known for hours that it will never be sent. Words pour out, and when they run out she hits send, it goes nowhere, only an error message on her screen replies and the words vanish into the void.  
  
The ugly gun she bought sits on her beautiful bed, cold and dead and not what she wants. She takes to wearing it anyway, because Mal approves and is quieted, and Jayne seems satisfied by it, takes it as a measure of developing respect between them. Kaylee and Simon drown in one another, though where there should have been happiness there’s too much quiet, and she catches Kaylee watching her sometimes, lip caught between her teeth.  
  
Inara ponders that now she is not a Companion, it could be much simpler between she and Kaylee. There had always been something, unspoken, unacted, but there and precious anyway. She wonders if Kaylee herself even realized it, and catalogues the fact that Kaylee’s innocence was a large measure of what she loved about her. That she could crave touch and closeness and have no thought, no awareness of how tangled it could have been if she’d pushed for more. Kaylee made love to her engines and let Inara bush her hair, and for Inara it was forbidden sweetness to keep the image of her grease-blackened fingers in her mind.  
  
Kaylee wants Simon, and now Simon wants Kaylee, and Inara discovers she’s forgotten how to want anything whole, anything that may be kept and worn openly. She thinks Kaylee is sorry for her, and it’s nearly unbearable.  
  
Except that anything, anything is bearable; it’s what she does, she accept, she bears, she endures and subsumes herself and smiles. She is grace, she is submission. So she was taught at the training house on Sinon, where she is no longer a daughter, where the door would be barred and slammed in her face if she were even brave enough to venture back there.  
  
She wears her gun on her hip like a soldier because it is ugly, and because she is not a soldier at all, and that suits her. Masks over masks over masks until she wonders if she even has a face; if, stripped to the core of her, she might find that she had in fact died.  
  
There, in that hall, her feet slipping in the blood on the floor.  
  
The bow was a useful weapon, deadly, but not designed for close spaces. She hadn’t bought it, long ago, because it was useful. She’d bought it because it evoked Diana the Huntress, the archetypal virgin goddess who turned her would-be lovers into stags and chased them down. Slaughtered them. It evoked the darker side of herself, she thought then, and it was important to recognize the beauty of that as well, even as she denied it ascendancy. Even as she dedicated herself to the joy and peace of giving of one’s self, of truly seeking another’s pleasure, it was important to acknowledge that piece of herself that belonged to the goddess of the cold, virgin moon.  
  
So she was taught in warm, gilded rooms, by the Guild which has now declared her name taboo. She had friends, once; she wonders if they write her letters that they do not send. She laughs bitterly at the younger Inara in her mind, who bought that bow; had she thought she understood darkness? In that younger creature’s mind, there had been beauty in everything.  
  
Soon Mal’s approval fades into faintly confused acceptance, and then distance. Zoe is carved of stone and Kaylee is soon pregnant.  
  
On Persephone, Inara looks for another knife.  
  
River follows her, creeps up behind her on bare, silent feet, and says, “This.”  
  
It’s something like an ax, crude, jagged, not sharp. Even Inara who knows nothing about weapons can tell it’s poorly made. It’s hulking and hideous, and she’s not sure she could even lift it with any grace, let alone wield it as it was intended – but how was it intended? What socially acceptable purpose could it have? Could one chop wood with that monstrosity?  
  
One of the Reavers had tucked into his belt half of a pair of tailor’s scissors. Inara remembers the way they glinted, between the rust and the dried blood, a single razor blade with a loop at the top. Not meant to be a weapon.  
  
She remembers in snatches like that, fragments like still frames, bits of sound, smells. They come at her in unexpected places, biting and snapping at her, and then they vanish again. Her hands shake, covered in Simon’s blood. There is sweat running into her eyes and there is something in her leg, a bolt or a dart or a bullet, something, she hasn’t looked, won’t look for hours yet. The pain is pitiful and insignificant compared to the fear. She can’t look.  
  
Except she isn’t there, she’s standing in the back of a farm supply store looking at an ax made of beaten scrap metal.  
  
River walks away, a whisper of red, leaving her there. Inara takes the weapon off its hook; it is heavy, but not so heavy as she expected it to be. She looks down at her hands on the comfortable, awkward hilt of it and knows River was right. This.  
  
The look Zoe gives her when she brings it back to the ship is appraising; more emotion than Zoe gives most things anymore, and Inara can only stare back, wide-eyed, caught. Jayne pesters her about it a bit, Mal is uneasy, and Kaylee’s lip drags between her teeth. Her belly is just starting to round, and she’s achingly beautiful that way, as if she was always meant to be so, a force of life and growth and renewal.  
  
Inara is careful never to touch her.  
  
They have a job on Persephone which keeps them there some days. Inara has no part in it. At first she sits in her shuttle and looks at her ax, contemplates it, tries to meditate on it. It leers at her, its ugliness refusing to become transcendent.  
  
She goes out, the ax strapped awkwardly to her hip with two scarves tied together. They roll and dig into her waist on the opposite side, chafing her skin. It doesn’t matter, or maybe it does, but she accepts it and there is no beauty in it, no joy, no peace. There’s just a dull, meaningless pain.  
  
Persephone is not a place for a woman to walk alone at night; she knows this. She could have brought the pistol she owned when she was a Companion, a tiny thing that would fit into a purse. She could even have brought the pretty little dagger; she knows how to use it. A Companion is not taken against her will.  
  
But when rough, faceless hands grab her and pull her into an alley, teeth mashed against her lips and whisky and sickness on her tongue, she doesn’t jab stiffened fingers into any convergence of nerves, she doesn’t dispose of him neatly.  
  
She bites down on his tongue. Blood rushes into her mouth, hot and choking, and through her drowning she’s screaming. Her hands find the ungainly hilt of the ax.  
  
She walks back to Serenity in a daze; her lips are split and bruised and something in her wrist feels wrong, but she clings to the ax regardless, dragging it behind her, letting its weight pull on tendons already stretched too far. She knows she is leaving a trail of blood. She goes to her shuttle and sits down before her mirror, the ax across her lap, and stares, and stares, and stares.  
  
She keeps staring when Kaylee’s worried voice comes at the door, keeps staring when the door opens; of course it does. Serenity is Kaylee’s, all of it, even this shuttle. When Kaylee’s hands reach for the ax, she flinches away. “Don’t -”  
  
“Shh,” Kaylee says, crouching down beside her, pulling the weapon from Inara’s limp fingers. When her hands come back to Inara’s face there’s blood on them where there should be engine grease. The dress Kaylee’s wearing is River’s, loose and red, bunching at her hips before the swell of her belly begins.  
  
“I’m not hurt,” Inara says. “I’m alright. You can go.”  
  
“’Course I can,” Kaylee agrees soothingly, and for a moment Inara thinks she has, because she’s gone – but then she’s back, bowl of water and soft cloth and brush in her blood-smeared hands. She pauses at Inara’s side, not touching, lip trapped between her small white teeth. “I could wash your hair,” she ventures.  
  
Inara manages to nod her submission, eyes finally squeezing closed, tears hot down her face, washing the blood away.  
  
“I thought ‘bout getting something like that,” Kaylee confesses into the dark, her hands on Inara’s head, warm water trickling through Inara’s hair and down her spine. She doesn’t have to ask what Kaylee means.  
  
***


End file.
